Notes on life, art, photography and technology, by a Danish dropout bohemian.

When you drink the water, remember the river.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Court Throws Out Janet Jackson Fine

"In a decision that clears CBS of any wrongdoing for airing the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” a federal appeals court overturned the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission levied against the station, calling the fine arbitrary and capricious.[...] "...the judges said that CBS could not be held responsible for the exposure, and went on to question the extent of genuine public outrage over it, saying that “the record is unclear on the actual number of complaints received from unorganized, individual viewers” as opposed to advocacy groups."Article.

Zippidy-doo-da.

"The 2004 incident prompted the commission to step up its enforcement of indecency rules. In the years that followed, the agency has levied larger fines on broadcasters than before, and in 2006 Congress agreed to increase the maximum fine for a single violation tenfold, to $325,000."

I am guessing this may hasten the flight of viewers from TV onto the Internet, where censorship is much harder to impose.

4 comments:

I've told you how PBS are now replacing subtitles where a swearword was, while leaving the original language cuss word in the audio.

Last night on Tatort (German version, not Austrian) something was downgraded to "Witch", though I didn't catch the German, and later something was re-captioned to "Crap", but the audio was clearly "Scheiße".

I was about to send you a similar article.Silly me, expecting even a remote possibility that something like that would escape you!

I cannot believe Pat Robertson still hasn't made hara-kiri over such "an outrage, a travesty of justice, a mockery of our moral values, a stab in the back to the very foundations of our society, a mule kick in the loins of decency, and a blatant disregard for my God-given supreme authority on all Earth matters".(Just quoting from my imagination. He probably wouldn't be so polite. :-)

Alex,Last week, I got the DVD for Bruce Lee's The Big Boss. Audio tracks: Chinese, English. Subtitles: English, among others.Here's the thing: when you watch it with English dubbing and English subtitles, you get two entirely different dialogues, loosely similar. It's very confusing!I guess one of the two (at least!) is an old adaptation from when the movie was adapted for Western diffusion.

I've seen plenty of Anime which has the original US dub, original US subtitles and the new US subtitles.

I think the worst was Baron Prasil, a Czech film with a very interesting speech by Cyrano De Bergerac about the moon. In the UK subtitles it was lovely and poetical. In the US dub it was crass, and uninteresting.